Loving others

In a sermon delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago (April 9, 1967), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of being committed to loving our neighbors – all neighbors.  In that sermon, he said:

• There will be a day, the question won’t be, "How many awards did you get in life?" … It won’t be, "How popular were you?" … It will not ask how many degrees you’ve been able to get … or “What kind of automobile did you have?" On that day the question will be, "What did you do for others?"
  Now I can hear somebody saying, "Lord, I did a lot of things in life. I did my job well … I went to school and studied hard. I accumulated a lot of money, Lord; that’s what I did."  It seems as if I can hear the Lord of Life saying, "But I was hungry, and ye fed me not.  I was sick, and ye visited me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was in prison, and you weren’t concerned about me.” …
  What did you do for others? This is the breadth of life.  Somewhere along the way, we must learn that there is nothing greater than to do something for others.

- from “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 

via The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and EducationInstitute, Stanford University.)

For Martin Luther King Day, I’d like to share some thoughts of my own about showing love – and God’s grace – to all our neighbors.  The following is excerpted from my brief book, Faith Lives in Our Actions (available at Amazon).  Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB).

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Loving all people

James, the brother of Jesus, pinpointed lack of love as a pivotal problem in our lives as Christians.  James wrote:  “If you fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you do well. But if you show partiality, you commit sin, being convicted by the law as transgressors ” (James 2:8-9).

If we could love with all our hearts, we would do well.  Love “is the fulfillment of the law” (Romans 13:10).  Jesus had said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God fully, and its corollary is to love your neighbor as yourself  (Matthew 22:36-39). James called this the royal law of Scripture.  It is the heart of the law, and it is where we fall most miserably short of what God expects of us.

James pointed at favoritism as the centerpiece of our lawbreaking.  Even after we have been converted to Christ, our old sinful tendencies diminish the extent of our love.  We may, for instance, spend much to send our own children to Christian schools, but give far less to extend Christ’s love to souls around the world.  Or we are pleased to be part of God’s kingdom ourselves, but often feel no great urgency to include others in his grace.  Once, when my congregation was planning an open house, I asked one of our members if he had invited his farmhands and their families.  He looked at me as though I had proposed something preposterous.  The thought had never crossed his mind. When I brought it up, it made him uncomfortable.  Mexican weed-pullers weren’t really the sort of folks he wanted in his church.  To him they were only hired hands, a lesser breed of people.

We try to convince ourselves we are law-abiding.  We set up church policies and programs.  We want everything to honor God, according to proper guidelines.  But we forget what the real line is:  love.  We callously, oafishly and repeatedly step over that line.  We strain out gnats while swallowing camels (cf. Matthew 23:24).  We make sure we have glorious choirs singing in our balconies, but fail to notice neighbors in need across the street.  When James described the sort of religion that God accepts, he mentioned nothing of formal church activities.  James had said, “Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27).  Those are the kinds of aims we are to seek.

Prayers in place of resolutions

'Old Man Praying," by Vincent van Gogh, Wikimedia Commons

I’ve never been a big believer in New Year’s resolutions.  Maybe it means I just don’t have enough resolve, that I’m weak on willpower.  But such is a symptom of the human condition in general, not just me.  Researchers consistently find most people fail at keeping New Year’s resolutions.  One frequently cited statistic says 80% of people’s resolutions fail within six weeks.  The most generous estimate I've seen says more than half of resolutions don’t last six months.

Rather than making promises to myself that I likely can’t keep, this year I want to focus on things outside of me that are more enduring -- things that remain constant and true whether I have stamina or not.  They are, in fact, the things that will give spiritual stamina -- the  strength to keep going, one day at a time, in the new year.  “Faith, hope, and love remain -- these three. The greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

So these are the things for my focus in the new year -- and invite you to share that focus with me. I offer these three prayers:

For faith:

Lord, help me trust in you and what you have promised. As a man like me once said, “I believe. Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).  Believing is hard when we’re faced with demons in our lives (as that man was).  Believing seems insane when we can’t see you, God, and haven’t a clue what you’re doing. But I pray for confidence, for contentment, for the ability to be thankful for what I do have ... and to be assured that when my heart is seeking God, I “shall not lack any good thing” (Psalm 34:10).

For hope:

“The days of our years are … but labor and sorrow” (Psalm 90:10).  Your word warned me of that, Lord.  Jesus said so, too: “In this world you have trouble” (John 16:33).  The daily grind and obstacles in my path make hanging onto hope exhausting. God, I need reminders that hope in your goodness can’t demand that you prove your goodness in ways obvious to me.  “Hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for that which he sees?” (Romans 8:24).  Help me, Lord, to hope for that which I don’t see, and to wait for blessings with patience. 

For love:

Forgive me, Spirit of Christ, for valuing things that are of little value when the greatest of all things is love.  On this earth, institutions and corporations seem to matter so much.  Careers and accomplishments are seen to define who we are.  But that’s not true.  A wise old man called all such things meaningless -- “a chasing after wind” (Ecclesiastes 2:11).  What really matters is being “rooted and grounded in love,” and comprehending “the width and length and height and depth” of that love (Ephesians 3:17,18).  Lord, enable me to “know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19), and to extend that love to people around me, knowing love matters most of all.

All Bible quotes from World English Bible (WEB).